Madam Secretary
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Madam Secretary

Madeleine Albright

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eBook - ePub

Madam Secretary

Madeleine Albright

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About This Book

"One of the most diverting political bios in recent memory." -- Entertainment Weekly

Revised and updated with a new epilogue, Madam Secretary is the moving and inspiring memoir of one of the most distinguished public figures in American history, seven-time New York Times bestselling author and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

A national bestseller on its first publication in 2003, Madam Secretary is the riveting personal story of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. For eight years, during Bill Clinton's two presidential terms, Albright was an active participant in some of the most dramatic events of our time—from the pursuit of peace in the Middle East to NATO's humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. In this thoughtful memoir, one of the most admired women in American history shares her remarkable story, including thoughts on her upbringing in Czechoslovakia and her role as a wife and mother, and provides an insider's view on global affairs during this period of extraordinary turbulence.

Madam Secretary offers an inimitable blend of Albright's warm humor, personal recollection, and riveting insight on events that shaped our nation and our world.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9780062265470
PART ONE
From Madlenka to Madeleine Albright
ONE
Heroes and Villains


I DIDNT WANT IT TO END.
Hoping to freeze time, I thought back to the phone ringing one December morning and the words, “I want you to be my Secretary of State,” and to the swearing-in ceremony where my eagle pin came unstuck. I thought of little girls seeking autographs on a triumphant train trip from Washington to the United Nations in New York; of Václav Havel’s face, warm and wise, as he placed a red sash on my shoulder and a kiss on my cheek; and of names enshrined on the wall of a synagogue in Prague. I thought of buildings in Kenya and Tanzania reduced to rubble; of coffins draped with the American flag; and of President Clinton in a rumpled shirt, with glasses perched on his nose, pleading the cause of Middle East peace.
I thought of the countless meetings, some in grand palaces in the middle of the night, others in remote villages where nothing grew except the appetites of young children yet people still laughed and lived in hope. I thought of the cheering of crowds, joyous in Kosovo and Central Europe but robotic in North Korea, and of women and girls sharing their fears in a refugee camp a few miles from the Afghanistan border.
The sound of tape being pulled away from giant rolls broke my reverie. We had been so busy, we hadn’t started packing until well after dark. Now boxes and bubble wrap were everywhere, sitting amid stacks of books, discarded bags of pretzels, and mementos gathered during a million miles of travel and almost three thousand days of government service. Staff members were scurrying about, preoccupied with sorting, wrapping, sealing, and labeling. Silently I withdrew into the small inner office of the Secretary of State, my office for a few hours more, and went instinctively to the window.
It was the view I would miss almost as much as anything else. Circles of light on the National Mall surrounded the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. Between them, obscured by the January night, were the haunting bronze figures commemorating America’s engagement in the Korean War, and the silent yet eloquent black marble of the Vietnam wall. Across the Tidal Basin I saw the dome marking our nation’s memorial to Thomas Jefferson, America’s first Secretary of State, and across the river the more distant glow of the eternal flame at John Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery. I felt intense gratitude for each day I had been given to build on the tradition of honor and sacrifice celebrated in front of me.
I may not have wished it to end, but the clock was ticking and there was much to do. I went to my desk for the last time, focusing on a piece of stationery I had centered there. “Dear Colin,” I wrote. “We have been working hard and hope when you arrive in the office it is clean. It will, however, still be filled with the spirit of our predecessors, all of whom felt representing the United States to be the greatest honor. So I turn over to you the best job in the world. Good luck and best wishes. Madeleine.”
MADELEINE WASNT MY ORIGINAL NAME. I was born in Prague on May 15, 1937, in a hospital in the city’s Smíchov district. In Czech, smíchov means laughter but there was little of that in Czechoslovakia during the year of my birth. It was an ominous time. I was christened Marie Jana, the first child of Josef and Anna Körbel, but I wasn’t called that. My grandmother nicknamed me Madla after a character in a popular show, Madla in the Brick Factory. My mother, with her special way of pronouncing things, modified it to Madlen. Most of the time I was called Madlenka. It took me years to figure out what my actual name was. Not until I was ten, and learning French, did I find the version that pleased me: Madeleine. However, despite all the language and country changes of my youth, I never altered my original name, and my naturalization certificate and marriage license both read “Marie Jana Korbel.”1
TO UNDERSTAND ME, you must understand my father. To understand him, you must understand that my parents grew up in what they thought was a golden place. Czechoslovakia was the only functioning democracy in Central Europe during the period between the two world wars and was blessed with a wise leader, peacefully competing political parties, and a sound economy.
The new democratic republic had been born at the end of World War I, when my father was nine years old and the entire map of Europe was reshaped. Germany and its allies had been defeated. Among those allies was the Austro-Hungarian empire, which had dominated Central Europe for three centuries and was now dismantled. Fifty-one million people of diverse nationalities suddenly found themselves in new or rearranged countries in accordance with President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination.
From its beginning the new country of Czechoslovakia was linked to the United States. Its creation was actually announced in Pittsburgh in 1918. Its president and the author of its Declaration of Independence was Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, an intellectual born of a Slovak coachman and a Moravian mother, who enthusiastically embraced the principles upon which America’s political system was based. Masaryk had also married an American, Charlotte Garrigue, and taken the unusually progressive step of adopting her maiden name as his middle name.
The birth of any country presents challenges. In Czechoslovakia there were many economic and social problems, including sensitivities between the more industrially advanced Czechs and the predominantly agrarian Slovaks. There were also tensions that would steadily worsen involving the ethnic German minority in what was known as the Sudetenland, a region that curls along Czechoslovakia’s lengthy border with Germany. But Masaryk was not an ordinary president. He was a leader of strong humanist and religious convictions, and under his guidance Czechoslovakia truly did become a golden place, with a free press, quality public education, and a flourishing intellectual life. Although Masaryk died when I was four months old, in every other sense I grew up with him. My family spoke about him often, and my father was deeply influenced by Masaryk’s profound faith in democracy, his belief that small countries were entitled to the same rights as larger ones, and his respect and affection for the United States.2
My father’s recollections of the 1920s and early 1930s show the pride and exuberance he felt. “As other European countries went through political and social upheavals, unstable finances, and one by one succumbed to fascism,” he was to write, “Czechoslovakia was a fortress of peace, democracy, and progress. We university students gulped the elixir of liberty. We read avidly national and foreign literature and newspapers, we attended every opening night in the National Theatre and National Opera; we wouldn’t miss a single concert of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.”
Prague had been a cultural mecca for centuries, and for young intellectuals like my parents it was an irresistible magnet. My father, growing up in the small town of Kyšperk, had dreamed of moving to the great city, of going to the places where Mozart had performed and sitting in cafés where Franz Kafka had conceived his ideas. He wanted to be avant-garde—to read Karel Čapek’s utopian fiction3 and buy paintings by Čapek’s brother, Josef.
There was not even a high school in Kyšperk, so at the age of twelve my father had to go to school in the larger Kostelec nad Orlicí nearby. He was a hardworking student, and always active in political and cultural life. He knew at an early age that he wanted to be a diplomat, newspaperman, or politician and planned accordingly. What he had not planned for was falling in love.
They met in high school. My mother was a little younger and quite pretty. She was petite, with short brown hair worn flapper style, and dimpled cheeks. My father had a strong, serious face and wavy hair; my mother used to say he got more handsome as he grew older. According to my father, when they met he introduced himself by saying that she was the most talkative girl in Bohemia, so she slapped him. Her name was Anna, a nickname for which was Andula, but from the time she was in high school she was known as Mandula, a contraction of my father’s name for her, Ma (My) Andula. She called him Jožka. Her parents, apparently not thrilled with the relationship, sent her away to a finishing school in Geneva. If this was a move to break them up, it almost worked. My mother wrote much later in a short essay on a yellow pad that I found at the time of her death, “Jožka was certainly a man worthwhile waiting for for seven years, before he was ready to get married.” She then added—and crossed out—“but I was not always so passioned. Couple times I was thinking of leaving this.” (Even after more than four decades in England and America, my mother’s English was heavily accented and she had her own version of grammar and idiom.)
She continued, “Very often I was wondering what was I admiring most in his personality. Was it his perseverance which he probably inherited from his father, who from a little shopkeeper became a shareholder and director of a big building company, or did I loved him because of his good heart, gentleness, unselfishness and loyalty to his family, which he inherited from his lovely mother?” Whatever it was, she never stopped adoring him.
My father completed his education as rapidly as possible, studying German and French with tutors during school vacations, then spending a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, perfecting his French and getting a sense of the world beyond Czechoslovakia. At the age of twenty-three, he received a doctorate of law from Charles University in Prague, the oldest in Central Europe. Following fourteen months of obligatory military service, he was accepted by the Foreign Office and, in my mother’s account, “after few months when he had to work without pay we could get married.”
The wedding took place on April 20, 1935. My mother, as was typical of the women of that era, did not have the university degrees my father had. However, she shared his cultural interests and was delighted to join in any adventure that led her out of the countryside and into Prague. They moved into an art deco apartment done up in black and white, and were soon part of the city’s café society. The following year my father was appointed press attaché to the Czechoslovak legation in Yugoslavia, and my parents were on the move again, this time to Belgrade. Yugoslavia was still a kingdom, and the fact that my father was an ardent democrat prompted him to befriend leaders of the democratic opposition, with whom he met frequently but discreetly.
“Maybe because we were young and happy,” my mother wrote of the time in Belgrade, “we have sometimes ignored the dark clouds which were forming on the political sky around us. We all were aware of it, but were hoping that somehow it will pass without catastrophy.” The young couple was optimistic enough to start a family—which brought me into the picture—but “catastrophy” was not far off. “The time of our personnel happiness was far too short,” recalled my mother. “Hitler was too strong and too aggressive and the Western Democracies at that time too weak and so the little Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia was the first to suffer, and with it the millions of innocent people.”
Czechoslovak diplomats had long counted on alliances with France and the Soviet Union for protection, coupled with their faith that the lofty principles of the League of Nations would be observed. Tragically, they had not counted on the rise of Hitler. Taking office in 1937, the country’s new President, Edvard Beneš, while sharing Masaryk’s humanist philosophy, lacked his charisma and ability to inspire people. He was, in my father’s words, “a mathematician of politics.” Still, Beneš did his best to warn Western Europe that Hitler’s ambition could not be appeased. In March 1938, Hitler successfully forced Austria into a union. In September, he demanded that Beneš yield control over the Sudetenland. Instead of siding with Prague, the Western powers hoped to avoid war by pressing Beneš to yield. In Munich, on September 29, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany signed an agreement demanding that Czechoslovakia capitulate. Two days later, the Nazis began occupying the Sudetenland. Beneš resigned. England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain notoriously declared that the Munich Agreement would “ensure peace in our time.” Those five words, along with the black umbrella Chamberlain carried, have stood ever since as shameful symbols of appeasement.
Applying pressure from Berlin, the Germans installed a puppet regime in Prague that purged the government and moved to erase all vestiges of the philosophy of Masaryk and Beneš. My father’s contacts with the democratic opposition in Yugoslavia had made him objectionable to Belgrade, and the new Czechoslovak Foreign Office complied quickly with a request that he be withdrawn. So in December 1938, we moved back to Prague. According to my mother, my father was given a routine desk job in the foreign ministry, but with the Nazis about to take over the rest of the country, he, like other loyal and prominent supporters of Beneš, faced a grim and uncertain future.
Since Beneš and several of his ministers had already fled, my father began looking for a way out as well. “To leave Czechoslovakia immediately was technically impossible,” my mother recorded. “There was complete chaos in Prague. Communication was stopped for a little while, banks were closed, friends were arrested. We learned from competent sources that Jožka’s name is also on some list of people who should be arrested.” For a short time I was sent away to the country to stay with my maternal grandmother, while my parents left their apartment and spent each night with different friends and the days on the streets and in restaurants, planning our escape. “It was mostly during the nights when Gestapo arrested the people,” my mother recalled. “With all the possible and impossible planning and with the help of some good friends and lots of luck and little bribes the last plan worked and we managed to get the necessary Gestapo permission to leave the country.” Speed was essential. On March 15, 1939, the German army had marched into the Czechoslovak capital. Ten days later, on March 25, my grandmother brought me to Prague. By 11 P.M. that evening my parents and I were on a train out of the country with two small suitcases—all they were able to pack in our hurry. Simply and chillingly my mother wrote, “That was the last time we saw our parents alive. It took us six years before we could return.”
We went first to Belgrade and then onward to London, arriving in May, around my second birthday. The city was flooded with foreigners looking for work, so my father was relieved when, not long after we arrived, Jan Masaryk, son of the former president and foreign minister of what was to become the Czechoslovak government in exile, came to London. Masaryk rented a small office and hired young former employees of the Foreign Office—among them my father. In July, Beneš arrived. The goal of the exiles was to work through British radio and newspapers to publicize the facts about Hitler’s occupation and to rally fellow Czechoslovaks.
I had always thought that my parents had acclimatized to life in England, but when I read my mother’s recollections, I saw differently. “We were surrounded only by Czech people, without making friends with English people with only a very few exceptions. . . . I have always admired their honesty, fairness in time of shortages, their courage in time of bombing, their determination to fight Hitler under very unfavorable conditions, but it took me longtime before I could understand some of their way of life and was feeling comfortable in their midst. . . . But just as we were waiting for our time to be able to return home they were waiting for the time when all the foreigners will be able to leave them.”
MY EARLIEST MEMORIES are of an apartment on Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill Gate. My parents slept on a bed pulled out from the wall, and we had a green telephone. When I heard my father broadcasting over the BBC, I thought he was in the radio. He had been put in charge of information for the government in exile, and his speeches were also beamed into our homeland for several hours every day. Other Czechoslovak families lived in our apartment house, which had been built especially for refugees. The neighbors sometimes fed me brown bread with pork grease and salt. We joined them in the basement at night when the air raid sirens sounded. I sang songs like “One Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall” and we all slept on makeshift bunks. ...

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